Rebecca Brückmann

Black and white photo of James Baldwin. He is wearing a tweed jacket and dress shirt underneath, a silk scarf cravat, slightly oval sun glasses, and is smoking a cigarette. There is a black bag strap over his right shoulder and he is wearing a ring on his left ring finger.

What James Baldwin said (generally). Happy Sunday!

Trump officials discussed sending elite Army division to Portland, text messages show A high-ranking White House official was indiscreetly texting about the Portland, Ore., planning last weekend, according to messages shared with the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Scoop by the - wait for it - Minnesota Star Tribune: "Anthony Salisbury, a deputy to White House top policy adviser Stephen Miller, sent the texts over the private messaging app Signal while traveling in Minnesota and in clear view of others." www.startribune.com/trump-offici...

Remembering Quintard Taylor: Historian of the Black West and beyond Dr. Quintard Taylor taught history at the University of Washington and created BlackPast.org, an online collection of global Black history. He died Sept. 21, 2025, at the age of 76.

How could a man who never set foot in a library until he was in college create what is considered the most extensive online collection of global Black history?

Maybe it had something to do with the story Dr. Quintard Taylor's father told him when he was a young boy.

m.kuow.org/stories/reme...

Manchester synagogue attack victims 'always smiling' and 'kind' Tributes are being paid to Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, who were both killed in the attack.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

My advice is that joy is also a form of wisdom.

❤️!!!

I am once again asking to go back to typewriters and snail mail for day to day professional correspondence because OMG, the emails.

Das ist vielleicht einer der Aspekte der momentanen Weltlage, die ich so bemerkenswert finde: 10 Jahre lang „critical whiteness“ (wieder: frei zusammen assoziiert in deutschen Diskursen) als die markanteste Bedrohung von Freiheit stilisieren und heute kein Wort mehr zur damaligen „Analyse“, nech. 🙃

Besonders lustig an diesem Artikel war, dass W.E.B. DuBois für diese Forderung als der Vorreiter präsentiert wurde (selbstverständlich durch selektives Lesen - denn bei Schwarzen Intellektuellen kann man schlicht frei assoziieren in D). Keiner der gleichen Leute gibt heute noch einen Pieps von sich.

Erinnert sich jemand an den AK-Artikel „Decolorize it,“ in dem Autor*innen forderten, die diskursive „Obsession“ mit Rassismus zu unterlassen und sich stattdessen auf Kapitalismus zu konzentrieren (because we can’t walk while chewing gum), den weiße Akademiker*innen enthusiastisch feierten? Yeah…

PSA: "Abbott Elementary" will return (season 5) in a little over ten minutes 🥳.

It will never not be hilarious to me when some supposedly Catholic weirdo argues that the Pope doesn’t really understand Catholic doctrine. Especially as someone who grew up Catholic. 😅

a black and white photo of a woman wearing a bra . Alt: a black and white GIF of Aubrey Plaza grimacing menacingly.

🙄

One clarification that seems important: a "classical" education alone doesn't prevent authoritarian mindsets (I appreciated, e.g., Jason Stanley's observations on that). A liberal arts education that emphasizes critical reasoning, independent analysis, and examination of our humanity might, though.

And this neglect or sheer dismissal of liberal arts is certainly not confined to higher education. It's a societal problem. But neither journalists nor politicians want to see past the "how much money did graduates make immediately?" wall (even if CS majors have high unemployment rates right now).

Liberal arts are on a long decline. Some Minnesota schools are finding new ways to boost them. English majors in Minnesota have declined by 44% while health professions have increased sevenfold, for instance. What’s the future for the liberal arts?

It is (almost) funny to me how, for decades, we've seen the decline of appreciation and funding for liberal arts (and subsequently enrollments), and for 10 to 15 years, we've also seen the rise of (technocratic) authoritarianism, but people won't connect the dots. www.startribune.com/liberal-arts...

A propos fascism: www.rferl.org/a/russia-ger...

(The broader theme of this week is what is conceivable and was it recoverable in historiography. We’ll move on to Saidiya Hartman and Marisa Fuentes next week.)

This week in my philosophies of history class we’ve discussed Popper’s rejection of historical determinism, and tomorrow we’ll continue with Trouillot’s classic, “Silencing the Past” and the (un)thinkability of the Haitian Revolution. I’m always in awe at just how good this book still is. 🗃️ #EduSky

You scared me for a sec, so: well done 🙂

Well, on a final final note: people (rightly) associate fascism with Nazism and the Holocaust. But that did not happen overnight. Fascism looks quite ordinary for non-marginalized people at first. You go to work, you have dinner, and still, neighbors are disappeared and human rights are suppressed.

a baby elephant is walking along a dirt path with its mother Alt: a baby elephant is standing along a dirt path with a partially visible older elephant in the background, scratching its trunk with a foot.

You need a moment of baby elephant, escapism, right? (And by you, I mean me.)

I love how in the same breath some UK officials say that they’re “not too concerned” with this development. Cool eugenics you got going on there, chaps.

Students look at me wide eyed when I tell them about some politicians having to resign in the late 1990s because they were caught in a lie. It’s strange to them now.

And as a final note: just like back then, so many of the people who would have the least to lose by speaking up remain silent. Because doing something would be uncomfortable. Others, meanwhile, can’t wait to assist fascism’s rise (in German: they are Steigbügelhalter) in the name of “civility.” #Fin

I meant that in 2023. And 2022. And 2021. And 2020,… bsky.app/profile/hist...

The belief that fascists don’t mean what they say/will be “responsible” while in office, the sheer complacency of many, the “doomer” reproaches for the past years, the “A (no state power) is just as bad as B (all state power),” the normalization of violence, the (not so secret) enthusiasm, all here.

*questions

The intellectual question: “How could people do this/let this happen?” We have lots of documentation and contemporary witness accounts. The emotional question: “How could people do this/let this happen?” Like THIS, right here, today. The banality of evil, really.

As a historian who grew up in Germany, I studied a lot on the collapse of the Weimar Republic and German fascism, especially the early 1930s. The intellectual question of “how could people do this/let this happen” were answered then. Now, people are answering the emotional aspect of that question.